TV As A Platform: A Common Goal Worldwide, FreeWheel’s James Rooke

The television industry is increasingly operating more as a platform than as individual providers, but there’s still work to be done to reinforce TV’s incredible power in an often changing and competitive media ecosystem. What’s not lacking is a global, common vision on the future of TV.

“What’s very clear to me is there is an alignment across the globe in terms of how broadcasters and operators see the world,” says James Rooke, GM, FreeWheel Publishers. “They all understand that there’s an incredible threat to their business coming from those looking to take TV dollars.”

From a software standpoint, broadcasters and operators understand that they need to “accelerate against the ability to offer the brand marketer the ability to buy quality inventory regardless of what screen it is, against any audience or dataset that they choose, and make that as simple as possible,” Rooke adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

“And then be able to prove attribution against that.”

Rooke works with sell-side clients and, regardless of language or nationality, there’s a common refrain.

“Whether we’re talking to a client in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy or the U.S., if you put them all in the room, there’s a very aligned point of view about what needs to happen for the premium end of the ecosystem to be able to thrive.”

While a core theme during the TV Upfront negotiating season continues to swing toward premium video and advanced audience targeting, underpinning that theme is an industry pulling together out of necessity to work more as a platform, according to Rooke.

“Television, if it can work in a more interoperable way, has an incredible opportunity to continue to shift dollars back into the ecosystem.”

Rooke considers the audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom—and most recently NBCUniversal and Univision—to be “a good example of large media companies looking at how they can create scale for brand marketers to buy against in more simple, more automated ways against audiences. I think that’s just the start.”

FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, sees its role as facilitating interoperability to help make “TV As A Platform” a reality. “Which is a bold and hard thing to achieve, but ultimately I think it’s a shared vision,” Rooke says.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview series of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.